Read Online The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace - Free Book Online Page B

world take its place.
    ‘The secret of the storyteller,’ father said, ‘is Never Smile. A straight mouth and a pair of honest eyes is all it takes to turn a stone to leaf.’ You’ve never seen a face like his when he was telling tales. It was as candid as the moon.

15
    T HERE WAS one certainty in what my father told to me. The woman in the hut, her child, the dog – none of these were false. They were not characters from stories. Their tale was far too bleak. ‘If what I wanted was a woman, I’d not invent one quite like her,’ he said. He mentioned her to no one there. He put her out of mind. But he could not shake her loose from his imagination. She haunted every story that he told. And every time he looked outwards from the village – towards the sea, towards the heath – it was her grey eyes that he saw, her body in the grass, a horseman’s hands upon her waist.
    Nothing stopped him now. It was expected, if he chose, that he would disappear again into the outside world. That’s where, it seemed, he got his stories from. The villagers imagined him, a hunter, tracking down his tales. He’d soon be back. Some villagers – those elders who mistrusted too much levity, those victims of my father’s tongue like Leaf – were quite relieved to see him go. He was disruptive. He had skills that could not be bartered in the marketplace. He had no time for stone. Some children were a little frightened of him, too. They did not like the scars and fissures of his arm. They did not trust his tales which, like sling stones, were sharp on every side.
    And so, when spring came round, my father crept into his uncle’s yard one night and helped himself to gifts that might please the woman and her child. A wooden top that had been his youngest cousin’s. A goatskin mat. Some nuts, some grain, a good flint knife. Some scallop candles. A pot. He wrapped them in the skin and tied them to his back. It was a night that only comes in spring. The air was warmer than the earth and, as he trod the usual route along the bracken path between the village and the sea, his feet sent up a puff of frost which turned to mist on contact with the air. In that no-light of moon and stars, it looked as if his feet were shining like a pair of tumbling glowworms in the damp.
    The sea was out. It was the spring low tide, and shore that normally was undersea was breathing air for once and basking in the moon. This was my father’s path. He took advantage of the tide. At night it seemed much simpler than the clifftop route, the path of wolves and goats along which he’d blundered in the summer past. He walked barefoot and cursed the pebbles and the weed which made the going both slippery and hard. The sand was worse – it opened up beneath his feet like drifting snow. One arm was not enough for keeping balance. He fell down and the sandprints that he made with hand and feet and knees winked and bubbled as they filled with sea. He’d left the glow-worms on the bracken path. Now his tracks were listless silver spheres which shrank and flattened as the wet sand at their edges collapsed to fill the holes.
    Quite soon he found a tidal ridge of shingle which was dry and firm. Now he could walk quickly despite the limpets and the cockleshells, the broken bones of cuttle, the crab claws and the vacant whelks which formed the ridge. From time to time he felt a movement underfoot – unnerving in that darkness – as foraging sandhoppers, sea slaters, crabs, who knows what else?, nipped and quivered at his soles. At first he was not cold. His exertions and the bag across his back preserved the warmth of his uncle’s house at night. But the sweat across his forehead and his shoulders was soon turned gelid by the wind which the sleeping land sucked and summoned from the bleaker sea. Soon he was as cold and damp as frogs. A little frightened, too. The sea, that night, curled and lisped and whispered in a voice which said, Dismay, Dismay, Dismay. No wonder